It’s Always Somewhere Else Until It’s Not

By Sarah C. Baldwin '87

Brown physicians trained for years to respond to a mass shooting. But nothing could prepare them to treat members of their own community.

Now that it's happened, I can say it: for many of the 20-plus years I worked at Brown, I worried about a mass shooting.

Much of my concern was driven by the reality of life in America, where shootings on college campuses—not to mention in elementary, middle, and high schools, grocery stores, night clubs, places of worship, military bases, offices, and movie theaters—occur with horrifying frequency and lethality. Another part of my anxiety, surely, was akin to a propitiatory gesture, a kind of preemptive magical thinking—the idea that worrying about something I fear will happen will make it not happen.

Yet during all those years, even as I worried, I actively savored—marveled at—the physical and philosophical beauty of Brown’s open campus. I could, and did, stroll into Maddock Alumni Center for meetings. Into Page-Robinson Hall for a new ID card. Into the Granoff Center for an art exhibition. Into the Engineering Research Center, which is connected to Barus and Holley, for a decent latte at the new café with the friendly staff in the light-filled Hazeltine Commons.

I was a Brown employee, but I could have been anyone. All I had to do was open the door. There was a generosity in that, a sense of What’s ours is yours. It was a lovely miracle. And a fragile one. In the end, worrying didn’t work.

Statistically speaking, what happened at Brown on Dec. 13, 2025, was somewhat unusual. It took place on a weekend, not a weekday, and it unfolded late in the day, not in the morning. But the basic ingredients of this tragedy are grotesquely familiar: a man armed with a grievance and a gun opened fire, ending two lives and upending others, and shredding our sense of safety. He taught us that openness is a luxury we can’t afford. I am sad and I am angry. I never wanted to be right.

Many faculty, residents, and students at The Warren Alpert Medical School have deep experience and expertise in emergency medicine and medical services. Medicine@Brown spoke with five remarkable individuals who cared for their fellow Brunonians in the aftermath of the shooting. Here are their reflections.

HOME INVASION

One of my colleagues was having a get-together for some emergency physicians at his house, a few blocks from mine on the East Side, when my wife [Clinical Assistant Professor of Medical Science Deb Gutman MD’99 RES’03 F’04, MPH, and an attending physician in emergency medicine for Mass General Brigham] got an alert on her phone saying there was an active shooter at Brown. Then I got an alert and immediately started driving to Rhode Island Hospital, about seven minutes away. I saw police vehicles on the way, which seemed to confirm the alert. In fact, every single trauma surgeon [in our division] heard the alert and came in.

At the hospital, the mechanics of the response were the usual: empty out the emergency department, get the patients in, assign teams, take care of the patients. These are things we do every day. But this was completely different. We see Brown students in the ED from time to time, but that day the number of them at one time and the circumstances were completely foreign.

People say about shootings, “This is common.” In your mind you think, You’re right, this can happen here. And in disaster medicine, we always teach, “Don’t think it can’t happen to you.” So in my academic mind, it could happen. But in my real mind, as it was happening, it was a foreign event.

As I walked down the trauma hallway, looking in each room trying to gauge what was needed for me to do, everybody had the same expression on their face: What is going on here? This is Brown.

But everybody did their job. That’s why we drill and drill and drill and practice and think about these scenarios before they happen. That training and the drilling came through, and everybody did their job to a T. It was a very well-executed response.

I came to Brown in 1982 as an engineering major, so my life for four-plus years was in Barus and Holley. Some of my worst moments were in Room 166! I remember exactly where I was sitting during an exam for a class in which I wasn’t doing well. Later, I taught a biomedical engineering class in Barus and Holley—not in that room, but adjacent to it. So this really was home.

Yesterday I was driving to work and I took a detour because of the snow. I went down Hope Street and drove by Barus and Holley and saw the infinity sculpture and the makeshift memorial with flowers covered in snow. That was a gut punch. All those memories came rushing back. This was Brown, this was home. Our home was attacked.

—Selim Suner ’86 SCM’87 MD’92 RES’96, Professor of Emergency Medicine, of Surgery, and of Engineering; Director of the Division of Disaster Medicine and Emergency Preparedness; Director of the Brown Advanced Emergency Medicine Academies

ONLY CONNECT

I was on call for medicine admissions when I got the alert from The Miriam Hospital that there was an external disaster. Then I started to get texts from Brown that there was an active shooter. It was horrifying, but my wife, Brett Summers, and our daughter live about a mile-and-a-half north of campus, so we felt relatively safe. The three of us were at home thinking, Oh, God. This national thing has come to us.

In the throes of it, we left a block of tofu a little too close to the edge of the counter, and one of our dogs, Badger, ate it. So Brett went to the local Indian grocery store to buy some more tofu for dinner. She and the proprietor were talking about the shooting and how horrible it was when he said, “There’s a Brown student at our restaurant across the street. She’s stuck there because she can’t go back to campus.”

Brett came home and immediately said, “Oh my gosh, I should have just gone over to get her!” So she went back and offered to bring her home, and the student willingly came with her. Ultimately, she spent the night at our house.

Our two older kids are out of the house, which feels a little quieter now. Having this young person come over and make herself comfortable felt reassuring. She was understandably on her phone a fair amount, texting her parents and friends, but then we sat down to dinner and put our phones down and talked. And it turned out we had all these surprising connections. I was a music major; she is a music minor. She loves Tom Waits, my favorite musician. She played us a Tom Waits song on the piano, and then I played some songs on the guitar. Also, her family dog’s name is Tofu!

I think there are more synchronicities between all of us than most people recognize. With phones and social media, we’re in a time of gradual fracturing of the human connection that we used to experience more when I was younger. Obviously we can’t say the gun violence epidemic is all related to iPhones and social media, but it is somewhat symptomatic of this fracturing in our society, the lack of common places where people connect. I think that for each of us that night, the moment of making connection felt like a little bit of humanism in the midst of a horrible event.

At Brown we are now living under a new level of security. I can’t get into the medical school building without my badge. I have to swipe twice just to get through two sets of doors that are 5 feet apart. Those doors used to be open. You’d walk in, pass the security guard, and say “Hi.” I’m not questioning the new security routines, but to me it’s a loss.

My main takeaway, though, is how stabilizing and calming it was to have a stranger in our house with whom we formed this momentary bond. When you reach out and try to help someone, you’ll find you have a lot more in common with them if you just make the effort.

—David Anthony RES’00, MD, MSC, Associate Professor of Family Medicine; co-director of Health Systems Science Curriculum

FAMILY MATTERS

I was at home decorating the Christmas tree with my kids when I got the text messages saying we’re expecting multiple gunshot wounds. I have a great team. Everyone came in from home. Nobody asked any questions.

For those of us who are parents, seeing those young people come in was like a gut punch. You go into action, and it’s only later that it registers. Knowing that these were Brown students hit very close to home, but it was their age that made you think, Oh, my God.

But what hit me the most, what you don’t train for, is the parents. They are the second wave, after the patients. They start showing up, and the cops are trying to figure out what’s going on, and by the way, the suspect is still at large. We’re on lockdown, so we only have information on the people who were brought to the hospital. The parents are coming in saying, “What happened, where is my kid?” The sheer panic on their faces—any parent can relate to that.

Who takes care of them? You’re busy keeping people alive, keeping the emergency response going, but who absorbs the parental distress?

In this case, I absorbed some of it, because I was giving the medical updates on each of the kids. So you’re trying to give updates, be as compassionate as possible. But you also have to stick to protocol and be thoughtful and strategic about who you’re letting into the hospital, who you’re giving information to. This person is distraught, and you’re like, “I’m sorry, ma’am, who are you?” That was hard.

And then there’s the moment you start doing the math. Your daughter was in the study group. She’s not answering the phone. And she’s not at the hospital. You’re watching families put this together, and you’re putting it together, and inside you’re going, Oh, no. It was awful.

We’re surgeons, we’re emergency room doctors, but we’re still people. At some point the cup spills over. At some point you’re like, This one actually hurts. Our team tries to talk about an incident like this within a week. This time we’ve tapped in a little bit more to what Brown offers—the people built into the system who can help you process. I think people are leaning on that more than they ever have.

It takes a village from beginning to end. There are so many people who have their hands in the process of taking care of patients, and people have disagreements. But when this happened, everybody came together. There wasn’t an argument about how we should or shouldn’t do something. It was just like, whatever keeps the ball moving forward.

On a Saturday around the holidays when you can get eight surgeons to come in because they want to be there—those are good people. And I want to be surrounded by good people, especially now. I am so, so grateful for the people I work with.

—Stephanie Lueckel, MD, SCM, Associate Professor of Surgery; Associate Chief of Surgery and Chief of Trauma and Surgical Critical Care, Rhode Island Hospital

A SENSE OF SAFETY, SHATTERED

When we got the notification, I was at the Nelson Fitness Center working out. Some of my medical school classmates were also there, but no one knew what was going on. There was little communication about what the status was. We got intermittent text updates, basically telling us to stay in lockdown, and we learned some things from the news. Students who had been in Barus and Holley had run up Hope Street to the gym. They were terrified.

I’m a supervisor for Brown EMS, and I was scheduled to work that night. So I was allowed to leave with an escort to begin my shift. Shortly after, students from all over campus were being shuttled to the Olney-Margolies Athletic Center. Shuttle drivers who weren’t even on duty came in and did that. It was incredible to see the community show up in so many ways.

EMS provided on-site medical support and first aid there, in addition to responding to calls on campus, which was surreal with the whole campus being covered by fresh snow and SWAT teams patrolling everywhere.

I felt almost lucky that I was able to go to shift and not think about the situation and just focus on doing what needed to get done. When I was in the gym, I was really scared—not necessarily for myself—and I was sad, because I knew the aftermath of this would be just terrible. And it has been. Once the adrenaline wore off and I ran out of things to distract myself with, I fully broke down.

In the coming days after the shooting, we third-years still had to finish our rotations. We still had exams to complete. That was some of the roughest studying I’ve ever had to do, trying to sit there and do practice questions while all this was happening.

I do research on firearm injury prevention, and so does one of my best friends, who was also in the gym with me that day. We cared deeply about this issue already, even before having a personal connection to it. For it to be literally right there, we were both like, What is going on right now? How is this happening?

Growing up in California, fire drills, earthquake drills, and lockdown drills were built into my life. But even when the first texts started rolling in, I was certain it was a drill. I definitely did not think it could happen. Despite doing the drills, despite doing research on this, I just did not expect this at all, ever.

Being back, the campus feels both the same and not at all the same. It feels like such a violation of a place that has become home. It is devastating for everyone, I think. Having a sense of safety completely removed—you can’t get that back.

—Anwen Lin ’23 MD’27

THEY HAD OUR BACKS

I was an EMT and firefighter before going to med school. One of the most important things I learned is to be careful about self-dispatching and make sure that your services are actually needed. I was on a cardiac ICU rotation when Rhode Island Hospital sent out a mass casualty alarm. I looked at the track board for the emergency department and saw there were a bunch of level-one patients, so I went down to the ED and asked Dr. Suner, “Do you need extra hands, or do you want me to head back upstairs?” He said, “We can use extra hands.”

One of the scariest things that happens with something like this is you don’t know how big the incident is. At first, I and the people around me in those six critical care bays were focused on getting done what needed to be done. But after the first wave comes in, you’re basically waiting, going, “Is there going to be a second?”

As the night went on, I started to realize there was this whole thing going on in the background of [people] basically backing us up. It occurred on so many levels. Other intensive care units in the hospital offered to take patients from the ER. The other ERs in Providence stepped up and took all of the volume we would normally get so we could focus on just the traumas. Virtually every fire department or EMS in the state sent some level of mutual aid, not so much to help with the shooting but just to take the normal volume of a Saturday night in Providence off of us.

I got a text from one of the guys I work with down in the Newport Fire Department, where I’m assistant medical director, saying, “Hey, we’re on our way to Providence.” One of my friends who works in Massachusetts said, “We’re sending multiple ambulances just to stand by and help out.”

That was overwhelming. It provided a bit of an emotional cushion to know that there was this huge response from all levels of the hospital and all levels of the state—and beyond—to back us up

Hours later, once it became clear that we had resources available but didn’t anticipate any more victims, we did an after-action debrief. It was less of an operational debrief and more of a chance for people to talk about how they were feeling. Eleven kids were shot. Two lost their lives. There was rightfully a lot of shock and anger and sadness about that.

But people also had good things to say about other people in the room—docs complimenting nurses, who were absolutely fantastic, nurses complimenting doctors. Everyone did their job and did it well. Even our one scribe on duty managed to keep track of nine patients who were all similar in age, with very similar injuries; he was able to produce great documentation. I think we all felt proud and appreciative of the people around us.

This is what we’re here for. If something like this happens again, we’re ready.

—William Levesque RES’28, MD, Emergency Medicine Resident at Rhode Island Hospital